Ministry of Education
IIT Kharagpur Developed NDLI Wins World Summit Award 2021
Kolkata, February 18, 2022
The IIT Kharagpur has developed a unique e-library of India which has won the prestigious World Summit Award  2021 for learning and education. The National Digital Library of India or NDLI as it is popularly termed, this innovative e-library has been developed by Dr Partha Pratim Das, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering and his team of researchers from IIT Kharagpur. The entire programme has been sponsored by the Union Ministry of Education.
The National Digital Library of India is a public digital library that offers free and open access to over 55 million educational resources. Since its inception in 2015, the NDLI’s mission has been to create a national knowledge of assets. A single window knowledge repository available in 10 Indian languages that transcends the barriers of geography and language to deliver quality education and create effective learning environment for the student across all social economic strata, the NDLI has more than 50 million contents delivered through multiple platforms and has more than 5 million viewers across the country. The NDLI has digitally united the world’s largest democracy by launching two pioneer new services, the ‘Study at Home’ segment for schools and universities and a ‘National Covid-19 Research Repository’ for students, researchers and entrepreneurs followed by a CBSE Exam Preparatory for schools, colleges and entrance exams. The platform also ran a nationwide resourcing of educational materials along with social media outreach programmes.
This 65 million strong repository is overhauled with an EdTech Service Platform with the Covid transformation journey which has been remarkable, moving forward from repository to being service oriented. The daily page views grew 10 times i.e., 2,00,000 with users ranging from school students to educators from around the world starting a hashtag ‘Fight Back Covid-19’ . Public and open access to quality content has always been the core value of this open source content platform along with its policies, serving the front lines as knowledge partners. An overhaul of 75 million plus metadata mammoth created into a trial service based AI platform in a period of 90 days, is the transformation to further scale and have a social relevance.
The library comprises all types of resources such as Books, Audio Books/Lectures, Video lectures, Lecture Presentations/Notes, Simulations, Question Papers, Solutions, etc. Educational materials are available from Primary to Postgraduate levels for all subject areas like Technology, Social Science, Literature, Law, Medical etc. For all the contents, User Interface is available in widely used Indian languages. A huge volume of educational materials is authored by a large number of authors and integrates contents from institutional digital repositories of a large number of Indian educational and research institutions.
The NDLI is powered by a unique process for digitally acquiring and curating the metadata of educational contents, running a vigorous online advocacy programme to mobilize learners and influencers across India. This e-learning mechanism aims to educate, enable and empower so that not just a privileged view but the whole India can learn, share and grow despite the crisis.
The World Summit Award 2021 winners have shown a commitment to solve social challenges using the digital solutions. Forty winners were selected among 380 projects with solutions from 182 countries. In UNSDG Learning and Education category, NDLI was the only winner from Asia while others were from Austria, Hungary, Lithuania and Malawi.
Founded in 2003 by Austria within the framework of the UN World Summit on Information Society, it is a global initiative recognising digital applications and content that contributes to achieve the sustainable development goals.